The Canteen Survey: Choosing and Compressing Points for a Summary

Model summary (69 words)

Students skip lunch for four main reasons. First, 62% miss lunch at least twice a week. Queues average 24 minutes at 12:40, so waiting takes most of the break. Second, price matters: a meal deal costs $4.50 and 210 students say cost is the main reason they go home to eat. Third, the hall is too noisy for conversation. Fourth, Year 10 has only 25 minutes, including walking time.

Why this version earns full marks

• It uses the reasons, not the survey's headline statistic alone. The 62% figure is used as a framing sentence because the governors need to know the scale before the causes.
• Points are combined logically: queue length and timetable pressure both concern time and are kept next to each other, but they are not merged, because one is about service speed and the other about the school's own scheduling.
• Wording is compressed through nominalisation and subordination ('Queues average 24 minutes at 12:40, so waiting takes most of the break') rather than by deleting meaning.

Compression technique

Notice that 'some students queue for over half an hour' is dropped entirely rather than compressed: the average already carries the point, and keeping both would duplicate. Compression means saying the same in fewer words; selection means deciding what the summary is for.

The overlapping pair

'The average queue at 12:40 is 24 minutes' and 'some students queue for over half an hour' are the same point at different levels of detail. Keeping both wastes words and makes the summary look like a copied list. The average is the better choice because it represents all students rather than an extreme case.

Notes excluded as irrelevant

• The canteen mural: its subject and painting date have no bearing on why students avoid eating there.
• The Year 11 football result: a sports achievement is unrelated to canteen use.
• The head teacher's favourite dish: personal preference does not explain student behaviour.

The principle being tested

Relevance is judged against the summary's stated purpose - explaining why students skip lunch. A fact can be true, interesting and recent and still be irrelevant. The football result is the strongest distractor because it is school-related and recent, which is exactly why candidates include it under time pressure.

A further distinction worth making

One note is relevant but not a reason: the 62% figure describes the size of the problem. A sophisticated answer keeps it as context and does not count it among the causes.

Why 'copy the shortest sentences' fails

1. Selection is not shortening. The task requires the reader to decide which points serve the purpose and to discard the rest. Copying short sentences preserves whatever the writer thought was short, which may include the mural and the football result.
2. The summary must be in the summariser's words. Lifting clauses produces a patchwork of the original's phrasing, which usually reads awkwardly and can reproduce irrelevant detail.
3. Overlapping points get duplicated. A copier will include both queue notes because both are short - the opposite of condensation.
4. The word limit forces prioritisation. At 70 words, only four or five ideas fit once connectives are counted; the summariser must rank.

What a summary actually requires

Read the whole text, identify the governing purpose, group related details, drop examples that illustrate rather than add, and rewrite each surviving point as a compact clause. Then count words and check that a reader who has not seen the notes could still explain the problem.

Self-check before writing

Can I name my four points in one breath? If not, I have not selected - I have merely shortened.